Hello there, how you doing?
Here in Sicily all is well! I’m planning to take 3 weeks off for the holidays starting next week – I really hope to switch off for a while after my best year ever in regard to revenue despite the lack of productivity because of little Lorenzo! I need to recharge, spend time with my parents who are coming to Sicily for Christmas, sign off the house renovation project with our architect and finally prepare for 2022 with life+business goal setting. But don’t worry… apparently WooWeekly won’t go on annual leave, so see you on Dec 22nd, 29th and Jan 5th as usual 😀
Anyhow, welcome back to WooWeekly, your appointment with WooCommerce tutorials, tips and updates handpicked for you so that you can learn something new!
WooWeekly is put together by myself, Rodolfo Melogli, founder at Business Bloomer, your go-to blog for WooCommerce tips and David Mainayar, co-founder at PeachPay, the backed-by-WooCommerce 1-click checkout solution. If you wish to spread the word about WooWeekly you can tell friends and colleagues to sign up at wcwkly.com
So, let’s get the party started… enjoy!
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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content
Today’s newsletter title is “Premium”. That’s because sometimes investing in a premium, well coded and extremely well supported plugin can give you a huge boost in sales and therefore a recurring return on the investment. In this issue, we cover advanced discount solutions and premium invoicing extensions. Enjoy!
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Offer Advanced Discounts
Offering discounts is a powerful, time-tested strategy to entice customers and boost sales. That’s because customers always appreciate a good deal – and helping them save money on products/services they’re interested in is a sure-fire technique to attract them. The good news is WooCommerce offers a solid coupon functionality by default to help you create discounts on your store. But while it’s great to get started, WooCommerce Discount plugins can come in handy for more advanced features like bulk-generating coupons, restricting discounts to specific users, or creating deals like Buy One Get One (BOGO). Let’s dive in: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-advanced-discounts/
WooCommerce Snippet: Get All Shipping Zones & Rates
As an advanced WooCommerce developer, at some stage you’re really going to need this PHP function, the same way you often browse through Business Bloomer’s WooCommerce visual hook guides or the product / order / cart getters. This time we go study how to “get” the shipping zones and rates, because it’s likely that you will need to loop through them when you need to display shipping rates somewhere, or for other custom functionalities. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-get-all-shipping-zones-rates/
WooCommerce Tutorial: Premium Invoicing Solutions
No matter what products or services you sell, billing and invoicing are integral to every business. But as important as it is, generating PDF invoices and sending them to every customer manually can be very time-consuming and prone to errors. Luckily, there are some excellent plugins in the WooCommerce ecosystem that can streamline and automate the invoice generation process for you. Last week we saw a list of free WooCommerce invoicing plugins – this time we’ll go through their premium versions, so that you can get a full picture of their full functionalities. Let’s explore them: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-premium-pdf-invoices-plugins/
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2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights
Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:
- What’s the Word(Press) on Black Friday? I know you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about Black Friday, but it is the biggest shopping event of the year and so is worth persistently analyzing in preparation for next year. Toward that end, Alex Denning at Ellipsis ran a study on 300 WordPress businesses, roughly one-fifth of which were on WooCommerce, and found that the mean discount level for Black Friday 2021 was 43%.
- War of the Five (CMS) Kings: Joost de Valk of Yoast fame recently briefed us on the state of growth in the content management space. He found that in the last 6 months, WordPress is down while Shopify and Wix are up. During the height of the pandemic, WordPress was adding <0.4% market share month-over-month, but that growth has since slowed down to 0.2%. That 50% market share milestone may be farther than it initially seemed for WordPress. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we’re talking about the market share of the entire Web here and the top five CMS platforms are WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and Joomla in that order, all of which individually account for roughly 2%+ market share.
- Rising of the North: WP Builds brought us the latest scoop on an upstart WooCommerce alternative for WordPress. It is called North Commerce and the developers confess it is a work-in-progress. We’re all married to WooCommerce here, but it’s worth keeping tabs to see if the rebels have wind in their sails.
- Winter is Coming: Despite the community’s fixation (as well as my own) on Black Friday & Cyber Monday, some stores may be making an even bigger splash during what remains of the holiday season, most notably during Christmas & New Year celebrations. It’s therefore vital that you stay organized during the holiday season, which is precisely what one of the latest WooCommerce blogposts is helping store owners do.
3. Bloomer Armada Headlines
Here are the latest news regarding Bloomer Armada, Business Bloomer’s private WooCommerce community.
- 58: it’s the number of Armada subscribers and Business Bloomer PRO students who joined our private Slack channel for WooCommerce support so far. Lots of interesting threads this week: variable product admin UX (so bad!), a plugin request for a price slider, a code customization to allow for conditional user role, and more. This is getting exciting and so much better than the previous system powered by CF7 + email…
- 2: it’s the number of “ships” in the new Bloomer Armada logo, which I just signed off with the designer and will upload soon, as long as we don’t decide to also overhaul the rest of the sales page. The Spanish Armada had 130 ships but it was not easy putting them all inside a logo LOL. Went for a big one + a small one to communicate “helping each other”, “community” and “team work”.
- 19: it’s the price of my first two mini-plugins, called “Premium Snippets”, in dollars (lifetime license). Still in beta, I already got 3 sales without any sort of sharing, advertising or PR, which will be done once I publish at least 10 plugins and validate my business idea (more than a snippet, less than a plugin, hence “Premium Snippets”). The cool thing is that customers get “priority commenting” functionality on the plugin pages, same as Bloomer Armada subscribers on the Business Bloomer blog. I simply reused most of the code I wrote a few days back and tweaked it a little to target “users who purchased a product category“. I’ll see if I can share a snippet soon.
4. ICYMI
WooCommerce Snippet: Display Variations’ Stock @ Shop Page
This article went through a full revision, so I consider it as a brand new post. Thanks to the various requests I get from Business Bloomer fans, this week I’m going to show you a simple PHP snippet to echo the variations’ name and stock quantity on the shop, categories and loop pages. Of course, if “Manage stock” is not enabled at variation level, the quantity will be null, and therefore the returned string will just say “In stock” or “Out of stock”. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-display-variations-name-stock-shop-page/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Generate Invoices For Free
Running an online store is no easy feat. You have to take care of order management, inventory, customer relations, production, marketing, and so much more. A simple business process like invoicing doesn’t seem like it will take too much of your time, but it often ends up doing so. That is why your best bet is to automate invoice generation. That way, you can attend to the revenue-generating activities that will let you take your business to the next level. If you run a WooCommerce store, you know it comes with many useful functionalities but not invoicing automation. But the good news is you can choose from many great invoicing plugins available to do the heavy lifting. We’ve done the legwork and prepared a list of free WooCommerce invoicing plugins you can use to put your invoice generation on auto-pilot: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-how-generate-invoices/
WooCommerce Tutorial: 7 Steps to Boost WooCommerce Performance
Speed is table stakes for ecommerce sites, so it’s important to consider steps to boost WooCommerce performance. Without a fast website, you are less likely to convert your visitors into customers. Shoppers expect pages to load quickly no matter the device they use. If your pages are slow, many will leave your site never to return. Enjoy: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/boost-woocommerce-performance/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Build a One-Product Website
Selling just one product can streamline your store’s operations and make inventory management and handling orders easy. It allows you to focus all your energy and resources on creating, marketing and improving a single product. If done correctly, this can help you build a significant brand value – as people will start associating your store with your flagship product, making you an expert in your market and helping you stand out from your competitors. Given its benefits, creating a one-product store is an excellent idea – all you practically need is the right product for your customer’s needs and a solid, easy-to-navigate website. Lucky for you, this article will help you with the latter, taking you through all the steps of creating a fantastic WooCommerce website for your one-product store. Let’s begin: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-one-product-website/
